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Current studies of "messy" broadcasting have so far concentrated on finding worst-case times. However, such worst-case scenarios are extremely unlikely to occur in general. Hence, determining average-case times or tight upper bounds for completing "messy" broadcasting in various network topologies is both necessary and meaningful in practice. In this paper, we focus on seeking the average-case "messy" broadcast times of stars, paths, cycles, and d-ary trees, and finding good upper bounds for hypercubes. Finally, we derive a recursive formula to express the average-case time for a specific "messy" broadcast model on a complete graph using a classical occupancy problem in probability theory, and provide a nice simulation result which indicates that this model behaves like classical broadcasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Achieving high performance for concurrent applications on modern multiprocessors remains challenging. Many programmers avoid locking to improve performance, while others replace locks with non-blocking synchronization to protect against deadlock, priority inversion, and convoying. In both cases, dynamic data structures that avoid locking require a memory reclamation scheme that reclaims elements once they are no longer in use. The performance of existing memory reclamation schemes has not been thoroughly evaluated. We conduct the first fair and comprehensive comparison of three recent schemes—quiescent-state-based reclamation, epoch-based reclamation, and hazard-pointer-based reclamation—using a flexible microbenchmark. Our results show that there is no globally optimal scheme. When evaluating lockless synchronization, programmers and algorithm designers should thus carefully consider the data structure, the workload, and the execution environment, each of which can dramatically affect the memory reclamation performance. We discuss the consequences of our results for programmers and algorithm designers. Finally, we describe the use of one scheme, quiescent-state-based reclamation, in the context of an OS kernel—an execution environment which is well suited to this scheme. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including rhetorical and quantitative dimensions of modern critical analogue, threatening sublime of bigness and the encyclopedia "Natural History" by Pliny the Elder.